1

Medieval Science Fiction:

An Impossible Fantasy?

Carl Kears & James Paz

King’s College London & University of Manchester

‘Science fiction is the history that we cannot know,

the future history and the alternative history’
Kim Stanley Robinson1

Science and Fiction in the Middle Ages

At first glance, the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘science fiction’ do not belong together.
This point, already noted in the prefatory remarks of James Hannam and further
developed by the contributors to this volume, is based upon a number of deeply
ingrained popular assumptions. The medieval commonly conjures up images of
knights, castles, maybe dragons. It is in the past, static, and confined to an ever-
receding and increasingly irrelevant period. When we think of science fiction we
often think of aliens, rockets, robots. SF looks to the future, continuously adapting
to advances in technology. It remains cutting-edge. Another view might see the
Middle Ages as a legitimate and time-honoured area of study. Its authors, such
as Dante and Chaucer, are canonical and worthy of serious literary criticism.
In contrast, ‘sci-fi’ seems populist, childish and escapist. It lurks outside of the
academy. Can this antagonism between the ‘medieval’ and ‘science fiction’ prove
productive? Are these truly two distinct categories? What happens if we put them
into explosive contact?
On the whole, histories of the science fiction genre do not do much to dispel this
sense of incompatibility. Books and essays that seek to locate the ‘origins’ of SF either
dismiss or ignore the Middle Ages altogether. A convenient way of pinning down
the starting point of SF is to look to Hugo Gernsback (1884-1967), who named the
genre ‘scientifiction’ in his editorial for the first issue of Amazing Stories (1926). But
the story of SF is not quite so simple, for Gernsback was already looking to the past
to authorize his ‘new’ term, compiling and reprinting older stories by H.G. Wells,
Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe as examples of what he meant by scientifiction.

1
Interviewed by Foote (1994).
4 Carl Kears & James Paz
As we will see, this theme of looking back in time in order to envision the future
is a recurring one in the construction of science fiction. Following the example of
Gernsback, much SF scholarship has turned its attention to the centuries before the
genre gained its name in search of roots, influences and precursors.
For instance, Paul Alkon’s Science Fiction Before 1900: Imagination Discovers
Technology opens with the declaration that SF ‘starts with Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein’ (2002: 1). Alkon qualifies this bold statement by admitting that the
generic idea of ‘science fiction’ did not come into being until long after Frankenstein
was written in 1818; nevertheless, any history of science fiction must consider
those ‘reciprocal relationships by which later developments forever change our
view of earlier works’ (9). This retrospective approach allows Alkon to read and
interpret a number of pre-1900 works by Wells and Verne and others as if they were
science fiction. The chronological timeline at the start of the book even extends
to texts as far back as Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone (1638), Johannes
Kepler’s Somnium (1634) and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). Yet, despite the
open-ended title of Science Fiction Before 1900, the chronology refuses to pass that
invisible line separating the medieval and early modern periods.
The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, whose contribution to SF
scholarship was recognized by a 2005 Hugo Award for Best Related Book, likewise
features an extensive chronology of science fiction and a chapter on ‘science fiction
before the genre’. Neither of these acknowledges any literature from the Middle
Ages or earlier. Brian Stableford begins his discussion of SF before the genre with
authors such as Francis Bacon, one of the ‘first and foremost champions of the
scientific method’ whose New Atlantis (written c. 1617; published 1627) ‘launched
the rich tradition of sf travellers’ tales’ and with Johannes Kepler, ‘another pioneer
of the scientific revolution’ who was apparently the ‘first to couch an earnest
scientific argument – a representation of the Copernican theory of the solar system
– as a visionary fantasy’ in his Somnium (Stableford 2003: 15-16). The chronology
follows suit by including both New Atlantis and Somnium as early examples of SF
but again reaches no further back than More’s Utopia.
In search of still earlier precursors or proto-science fiction, other critics and
historians of the genre have looked to more ancient texts. H. Bruce Franklin claims
that SF has a ‘long prehistory’ which can be traced back to the myths and epics
of early Greek civilization. Homer’s Odyssey resembles modern science fiction
because it ‘narrates a marvelous voyage to far distant alien worlds’ (Franklin 2009:
26). Another firm favourite in discussions of proto-SF is Lucian of Samosata’s A
True History, dating from the second century AD, which describes voyages to
outer space, encounters with alien races, interplanetary warfare, and many other
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 5
SF themes, tropes and indeed clichés (see further Fredericks 1976). In New Maps
of Hell, Kingsley Amis remarked that ‘the sprightliness and sophistication of True
History make it read like a joke at the expense of nearly all early-modern science
fiction, that written between, say, 1910 and 1940’ (Amis 1960: 28).
There is evidently no agreed upon originary moment or foundational text for
science fiction. However, it is very common for constructed histories of SF to
exclude the Middle Ages: either by fixing the roots of the genre in the scientific
‘revolutions’ thought to be underway during the Renaissance and Enlightenment or
by making a leap from ancient to early modern narratives of imaginary voyages and
scientifically inspired visions. A typical timeline of early science fiction, compiled
from the above and similar sources, would resemble the following:
Homer, The Odyssey (c. 8th century BC)
Lucian of Samosata, A True History (2nd century AD)
NOTHING OF ANY INTEREST (c. 500-1500)
Thomas More, Utopia (1516)
William Shakespeare, The Tempest (c. 1610)
Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis (1627)
Johannes Kepler, Somnium (1634)
Francis Godwin, The Man in the Moone (1638)
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (1726)
Voltaire, Micromegas (1752)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)2
What is the rationale behind this? Sometimes SF histories simply pass over the
medieval period in silence, presumably through ignorance or straightforward lack
of interest. But many of the standard guides and companions to science fiction do
provide some reasoning.
In the Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Adam Roberts aligns the origins of
SF with the heliocentric, rather than geocentric, model of the universe developed
by Nicolaus Copernicus and published in 1543. Roberts claims that ‘broadly
speaking we can argue that SF begins at the time that science, as we understand
the term today, begins’ and that ‘Copernicus has become emblematic of this sea-
change in Western science’ (2009: 4). For this reason, the many varieties of SF,
such as interplanetary travel, alien encounters, and utopias, emerge as a ‘reaction
to the imaginative expansion the Copernican revolution would entail’ (11). In
the Cambridge Companion, Stableford introduces the origins of SF by explaining
that the word ‘science’ acquired its modern meaning ‘when it took aboard the
2
Timeline compiled from sources such as Alkon (2002), James and Mendlesohn (2003), Andrews and
Rennison (2006), Seed (2008) and Bould et al. (2009).
6 Carl Kears & James Paz
realization that reliable knowledge is rooted in the evidence of the senses, carefully
sifted by deductive reasoning and the experimental testing of generalizations’. He
goes on to assert that it was only in the seventeenth century that ‘writers began
producing speculative fictions about new discoveries and technologies that the
application of scientific method might bring about’ – though the earliest examples
were accommodated ‘rather uncomfortably’ within existing genres and narrative
frameworks (Stableford 2003: 15).
So it is the ‘science’ in science fiction that is the key to locating and defining
the genre. While this rationale does not always rule out literature from Greco-
Roman civilizations (ancient Greece, in particular, is often lauded for its scientific
achievements) it does exclude medieval literary culture time and time again.
Thoughtful as these rationales can be, the chronologies and timelines of SF that
they produce do fall into the same trap as many conventional, teleological histories
of science that view the Middle Ages as an aberration in the neat progression from
the enlightened ancients to our modern age.
This is no mere popular prejudice, of the kind described by James Hannam: a
number of scholars have dedicated their careers to demonstrating that there was
such a thing as medieval science. This is perhaps best exemplified by the recently
published second volume of the Cambridge History of Science series, which is devoted
to the topic of ‘medieval science’ and assembles a large number of these scholars,
including its editors David C. Lindberg and Michael H. Shank. The explicit aim
of this volume is to prove that, despite popular misconceptions, medieval science
did exist and was both important and influential. The volume reveals the diversity
of goals, contexts and accomplishments in the study of nature during the Middle
Ages: from early medicine and natural science to the medieval science of light and
colour; from Islamic mathematics and astronomy to late medieval alchemy; from
schools and universities in medieval Latin science to the relationship between
technology and science throughout the Middle Ages. In the introduction to the
book, the editors discuss the prejudice they face when explaining their work: ‘After
asking what we do for a living people often find the answer jarring. “The history of
medieval science?” How, indeed, can one use a synonym for “backward” to modify
a noun that signifies the best available knowledge of the natural world?’ (Lindberg
and Shank 2013: 1).
This prejudice has a long ancestry. One example that is particularly pertinent
for our collection is that of Carl Sagan – famous astronomer and noted SF fan
and author – who propagated the picture of the medieval period as barbarous
and unscientific in his television series Cosmos to an audience estimated at half a
billion. As Lindberg and Shank point out, Sagan produced a timeline of astronomy
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 7
from Greek antiquity to the present which left a thousand-year blank between the
fifth and fifteenth centuries labelled as a ‘poignant lost opportunity for mankind’.
Lindberg and Shank counter this with the comment that the ‘timeline reflected
not the state of knowledge in 1980 but Sagan’s own “poignant lost opportunity”
to consult the library of Cornell University, where he taught’ for in it ‘Sagan would
have discovered large volumes devoted to the medieval history of his own field,
some of them two hundred years old’ (Lindberg and Shank 2013: 9-10).
Alas, the view of the Middle Ages as fundamentally unscientific lingers in the
popular imagination, but books like The Cambridge History of Science: Medieval
Science are starting to remedy this. Likewise, James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers:
How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations for Modern Science (2010) represents
a significant attempt to bring the author’s own research as well as that of other
historians of medieval science to a wider audience of readers. Its inclusion on the
shortlist for the Royal Society’s 2010 Science Book Prize recognized this endeavour.
This scholarly and popular historical work on medieval science opens up the
possibility of ‘medieval science fiction’. Of course, when we discuss medieval
science we must carry with us an awareness that the meanings of ‘science’ or
scientia will have changed across time; we must view earlier attempts to study
nature and ask questions about the cosmos with respect. In his essay on ‘Medieval
Cosmology and World Building’ for this volume, Brother Guy Consolmagno
argues that, since science fiction is a genre in which setting or ‘world building’ is
so crucial, the challenge for SF readers and writers is to ‘do justice to the richness
of medieval cosmology while enjoying its contrast with our modern worldviews’.
For Consolmagno, a true understanding of medieval cosmology must not only
encompass the scientific underpinnings of their universe but also their sense of
‘multiple, overlapping cosmologies’ whereby knowledge was thought to exist
on many different levels, simultaneously. Medieval cosmology emerges from
Consolmagno’s essay as something that clearly belongs to the history of science yet
remains distinct from modern scientific thinking.
This raises a key issue for Science Fiction Studies: does the genre need to keep
pace with scientific and technological ‘progress’ by abandoning texts in which
the science has now been debunked? Or could it take a more inclusive view of
science, accepting theories and technologies that were appropriate to the science
of earlier periods? In a recent collection of essays on Classical Traditions in Science
Fiction, the editors Brett M. Rogers and Benjamin Eldon Stevens argue that certain
Greco-Roman works may be read as ‘SF’ in their own right (and not merely as
proto-SF or as precursors to the modern genre) if we understand them as forms of
‘knowledge fiction’. From this perspective, a work is open to being read according
8 Carl Kears & James Paz
to SF heuristics ‘not in terms of its historical or cultural provenance, but in terms of
how it engages with contemporary epistemologies; of particular interest is whether
and how a work innovates with respect to such epistemologies’ (Rogers and Stevens
2015: 12).3 This novel approach is conducive to our aims for Medieval Science
Fiction and, if we begin to acknowledge medieval modes of understanding the
cosmos in a more nuanced and sensitive manner, then such an approach could be
applied to the literature of this premodern period too. A good starting point would
be to examine how medieval texts engage with the scientific potentialities of their
time.
Computus was perhaps the most important scientific work carried out during the
early Middle Ages. It is a method of reckoning time to construct a more precise
calendar, requiring mathematical skill, accurate observation of heavenly phenomena,
and a basic understanding of astronomy and the structure of the cosmos. What is
interesting for our purposes is the fact that a number of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts
appear to use the science of computus as an organising principle for marvellous
accounts of faraway places. A key example is a lavishly illustrated, mid-eleventh-
century manuscript, kept in the British Library under the title of Cotton Tiberius
B.v.4 It displays complex computus and metrical tables, a calendar, astronomical
materials, a world map or mappa mundi, but also The Wonders of the East, which
describe and depict weird ‘alien’ beings thought to dwell in distant lands – such as
the half-human and multilingual donestre who entice travellers with their engaging
conversation before devouring all of their bodies save the head, over which they
mourn. As an early scientific treatise of sorts, this manuscript collects material
conveying knowledge of the physical universe, from extreme geographical locations
to the distant stars, but sets this precise, measured science beside wondrous texts and
images. In this sense, Cotton Tiberius B.v. anticipates those early pulp SF magazines
which featured factual scientific articles alongside adventure stories set on alien
planets inhabited by bug-eyed monsters (see Figures 1 and 2).5 Although medieval
books of monsters and marvels operated in very different worldviews to the SF pulps,
they have a comparable concern with measure and proportion and accuracy, and
use this scientific rigour as a means of providing verisimilitude for fabulous, perhaps
otherwise incredible, reports of far off places. As Asa Mittman and Susan Kim have
3
Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (2015) is the first collection of essays in English to focus on how
science fiction draws deeply on ancient Greek and Roman mythology, literature and art. In a similar
vein to Medieval Science Fiction, the editors and contributors to this collection consider modern SF as a
site of classical reception while also contending that specific ancient Greco-Roman texts may be read as
science fiction or, more broadly, as ‘knowledge fiction’.
4
See McGurk et al. (1983).
5
For a beginner’s introduction and background to the SF magazines, see Ashley (2008).
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 9
pointed out, the creatures in The Wonders of the East are ‘vaguely known beings,
firmly believed in but never personally observed, never even glimpsed fleetingly’.
The text of the Wonders records the name, size, location and habits of these various
creatures, but because they would have been almost impossibly remote from the
early medieval reader, the brief text and the image accompanying it ‘cannot be
made sharper, more precise, without significant imaginative engagement’ (Mittman
and Kim 2013: 16-17). By representing ‘impossibly remote’ beings and geographies
yet at the same time inviting us to imaginatively ‘realize’ the wonders inhabiting
the other side of the world, the demands that the Wonders make on their readers
(and viewers) resonate with Darko Suvin’s famous definition of SF as ‘a literary
genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction
of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative
framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment’ (Suvin 1979: 7-8).
The Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle is paired with another version
of the Wonders of the East in Cotton Vitellius A. xv. (i.e. the Beowulf manuscript).
The Letter combines the meticulous ‘science’ and fabulous ‘fictions’ found in the
Wonders and draws them into a narrative. As such, it may well qualify as one of the
earliest SF stories in the English language. In this text, the epistolary form is used
to think through the layout of the heavens and the earth. The voice of Alexander
is the voice of early scientific exploration, consistently attempting to measure, map
and count the alien, the weird, the inhospitable. One of the tensions within the
Letter is between that which can be defined and that which escapes the bounds of
human reason. Alexander’s relationship with his teacher, the natural philosopher
Aristotle, shapes the narrative and, in the opening of the Letter, Alexander asks his
wise mentor to contain and correlate the ‘countless’ wondrous things he has seen:
Ond for þon þe ic þe wiste wel getydne in wisdome, þa geþohte ic for þon to þe to
writanne be þæm þeodlonde Indie ond be heofenes gesetenissum ond be þæm
unarimdum cynnum nædrena ond monna ond wildeora, to þon þæt hwæthwygo to
þære ongietenisse þissa niura þinga þin gelis ond gleawnis to geþeode. (para. 2)
[And because I know you to be well established in wisdom, I thought to write to you
about the noble land of India and about the layout of the heavens, and the uncountable
kinds of serpents and men and wild beasts, in order that your learning and knowledge
might serve the understanding of these new things somewhat.]6
But the text is teeming with alien encounters and many of these strange beings
defy human cognition. There are water monsters which the Old English text calls
nicors. But what are these creatures? What do they look like? Where do they come
6
Text is taken from Orchard (1995). Translation our own.
10 Carl Kears & James Paz
from? The following passage from the Letter describes the nicors in grotesque but
ambiguous terms, leaving the fate of their victims as an unfathomable mystery:
Þæt wæs þonne nicra mengeo on onsione maran ond unhyrlicran þonne ða elpendas in
ðone grund þære ea ond betweoh ða yða þæs wæteres þa men besencte ond mid heora
muðe hie sliton ond blodgodon ond hie ealle swa fornamon, þæt ure nænig wiste hwær
hiora æni cwom. (para. 15)
[That was when many water-monsters appeared, larger and fiercer than the elephants,
who sucked the men between the waves of the water down to the river bottom, and
sliced and bloodied them with their mouths, and took them all away, so that none of us
knew where any of them had gone.]
For science fiction readers, these underwater aliens might evoke the Cthulhu
Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. Indeed, the opening of Lovecraft’s weird SF tale, ‘The
Call of Cthulhu’, recognizes that scientific exploration can reveal horrors as well as
wonders: ‘The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human
mind to correlate all its contents’ (Lovecraft 1999: 139). Likewise, Alexander’s
relentless search for knowledge, his continuous efforts to account for the marvels he
witnesses, ultimately results in foreknowledge of his own death. At the close of the
Old English narrative, Alexander reaches the talking Trees of the Sun and Moon,
which are said to give truthful answers to anything asked of them. Alexander first
asks the Trees whether he will be able to force all middle-earth under his control;
the Trees confirm that he will become king and lord of the entire world but that he
will not return to his homeland alive, a fate that depresses Alexander’s previously
voracious mind:
Ða þohte ic on minum mode ond on minum geþohte on hwelcre stowe ic sweltan
scolde. Mid þy ða ærest se mona upeode þa gehran he mid his sciman þæm triowum
ufeweardum ond þæt triow ondswarode þæm minum geþohte ond þus cwæð:
‘Alexander fulne ende þines lifes þu hæfst gelifd, ac þys æftran geare þu swyltst on
Babilone on Maius monðe from þæm þu læst wenst from þæm þu bist beswicen.’ Ða
wæs ic swiðe sariges modes. (para. 38)
[Then I thought in my mind and in my thoughts in which place I should die. When
the moon first rose it touched the tops of the trees with its light and the tree answered
my thoughts and said: ‘Alexander, you have lived the full term of your life, and in the
following year you shall die in Babylon, in the month of May, from that which you least
expect you will be overcome by.’ Then I was extremely troubled in mind.]
In its manuscript context, the Letter of Alexander immediately follows the Wonders
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 11
of the East and immediately precedes Beowulf.7 Just as we have done with the
Wonders and the Letter, Daniel Anlezark asks, in his essay for this collection, ‘Is
Beowulf Science Fiction?’ Although Anlezark points out the anachronism inherent
in such a question, he finds that this approach can help to identify the place of
early medieval science in the composition and reception of this poem. Unlike
Consolmagno, who deals with the prevailing cosmology of the high and late Middle
Ages, Anlezark investigates an earlier, oft-overlooked, harder-to-define cosmology.
Nonetheless, by teasing out the science behind the fictions of Beowulf – from the
science of creation and genetic links between monsters to the terminology of how
solid water is formed – Anlezark shows that this Old English poem applies ‘common
sense and reason to inherited ideas which seem logically implausible in nature’ and
thus ‘when it comes to the bottom line, medieval scientific fact trumps epic fiction’.
If we travel forward through time to the thirteenth century we find that
combinations of science and fiction continue to produce fascinating results.
Roger Bacon is a towering figure in the history of Western science. For Bacon,
experimental science (scientia experimentalis) becomes important when reasoning
alone (argumenta) cannot bring one to certain truths; this scientific approach is
not simply about unveiling the secrets of nature in a theoretical sense but could
be practical, producing wondrous artificial instruments and military technology
(Bartlett 2008: 122-23). With this context in mind, it is interesting to note that
Bacon viewed Alexander and Aristotle as the ideal model for the relationship
between rulers and natural philosophers, citing the example of Alexander granting
Aristotle licence to send out thousands of men to gain experimental knowledge of
all things on the face of the earth; in return, Aristotle was able to hand over control
of the world to Alexander through the paths of knowledge and works of science
(see Bartlett 2008: 132). But Bacon went further still. In his Letter on Secret Works
of Art and of Nature and on the Invalidity of Magic, he again draws on the legend of
Alexander to lend authority to his dreams of flying machines and submarines ( see
Figures 3 and 4):
And an instrument for flying can be made, such that a man sits in the middle of it,
turning some sort of device by which artificially constructed wings beat the air in
the way a flying bird does [...]. And instruments can be made for walking in seas and
rivers, right down to the bottom, without bodily danger. For Alexander the Great
used these to see the secrets of the sea, according to what Ethicus the astronomer says.
(Bacon: ch. 4)8
7
The digitized Beowulf-manuscript, or London, BL, Cotton MS Vitellius A. xv., can be viewed online
at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=cotton_ms_vitellius_a_xv.
8
Translation by Michael S. Mahoney, available online at: http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/h392/
bacon.html.
12 Carl Kears & James Paz
Such passages testify to the complicated interplay between science and fiction in the
Middle Ages. Is this a case of fiction extrapolating from science? Or is this science
extrapolating from fiction? In his essay on ‘The Riddle of Medieval Technology’,
Andy Sawyer strikes a note of caution when it comes to Bacon’s speculative visions
by suggesting that, while these sound very much like science fiction, they might
not be SF in the familiar sense of the term. Sawyer questions how much Bacon
actually anticipates or predicts in his Letter, for Bacon is not necessarily buying into
a narrative of ‘progress’ (i.e. extravagant fiction today; cold fact tomorrow) in the
manner that was so typical of Golden Age SF authors like Arthur C. Clarke and
Isaac Asimov (though embraced less willingly by their more cynical New Wave
and Cyberpunk successors).
On the other hand, Alison Harthill’s contribution to this collection singles out
a lesser known figure and text – Conrad Kyeser and his Bellifortis (c. 1405) – as
a surprising yet convincing example of medieval science fiction. Harthill finds
that the contents of the Bellifortis lend themselves to a definition of SF by making
‘imaginative leaps which would have been beyond the technology of the day and
are in a sense automatically futuristic since they appear to be a projection of future
weaponry’. By featuring descriptions and illustrations of such marvels as mechanical
dragons and strangely animated war machines, the Bellifortis appears to ‘provide
the reader with material for dreams which go beyond the bounds of what is known,
of what is reality’. Like Bacon, Kyeser shows a similar obsession with the legends
of Alexander but his war manual does seem to be drawing on ancient knowledge in
order to envisage the future.
Whatever we make of them, Bacon’s Letter and Kyeser’s Bellifortis are generally
enthusiastic, even optimistic, about the power of science and technology. However,
SF does not always extol scientific possibilities unreservedly. Many works of modern
SF contain a cautionary note. Similarly, medieval writers could imagine hazardous
branches of scientia in which arcane experimentation or misused artifice resulted
in failed attempts to reach the heavens or in technology that opposed spiritual
wisdom. Geoffrey Chaucer was one such writer. Famous as the so-called ‘father’
of English literature, Chaucer was also deeply interested in the scientific culture of
the later Middle Ages. His amateur but serious intellectual pursuit of astronomy is
best represented by his Treatise on the Astrolabe, an elementary textbook about a
complex instrument for capturing the movements of stars and planets.
In addition to astronomy, Chaucer’s scientific understanding extended to natural
philosophy, medicine, mechanical devices and alchemy. The latter should be taken
seriously in the history of science as a form of learning concerned with all aspects
of chemical and mineral technology and theory and with close links to pharmacy
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 13
as well. Yet alchemy was also concerned with the transmutation of metals, and
is especially infamous today for the vain attempts of medieval alchemists to turn
base metals into gold – the quest for the elusive Philosopher’s Stone. We should
not assume that this scepticism about alchemy is exclusive to ‘rational’ moderns,
though. Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale demonstrates that fourteenth-century
literary fiction could display a lively distrust of fraudulent alchemists, sending up
their pseudo-science while imagining and dramatising its harmful effects in the
world.
Chaucer describes the procedures and instruments of alchemy in such precise
detail that it is tempting to think that the author must have had a keen fascination
with – if not direct experience of – the practice (Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, ll. 750-
897).9 But this should not be mistaken for approval. As Scott Lightsey has pointed
out, in his representation of the ‘slyding science’ of alchemy, Chaucer betrays
a concern with the darker side of this misguided inquiry, exploring its ‘spiritual
and yet intimately somatic effects’ upon humankind via the figure of the Canon
who is ‘transformed from a fresh youth into a leaden-skinned automaton through
alchemical practice’ (Lightsey 2007: 98). In this sense, it is worth comparing the
Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale with an SF masterwork like Frankenstein:
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch
whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were
in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His
yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a
lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only
formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same
colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and
straight black lips. (Shelley 2012: ch. 5, emphasis added).
Both texts reveal anxieties about the impact that reckless experimentation may
have upon the human body:
With this Chanoun I dwelt have seven yeer,
And of his science am I never the neer.
Al that I hadde, I have lost therby,
And, God wot, so hath many mo than I.
Ther I was wont to be right fressh and gay
Of clothyng and of oother good array,
Now may I were an hose upon myn heed;
And wher my colour was bothe fressh and reed,
9
References from Chaucer (2008: 270-81).
14 Carl Kears & James Paz
Now is it wan and of a leden hewe —
Whoso it useth, soore shal he rewe —
And of my swynk yet blered is myn ye.
Lo, which avantage is to multiplie!
That slidynge science hath me maad so bare
That I have no good, wher that evere I fare. (ll. 720-33, emphasis added)
Frankenstein is often claimed as the first work of SF for the way that it depicts a
post-Enlightenment scientist experimenting with new theories and technologies to
alter the nature of human life – both spiritual and corporeal – yet ultimately failing
and suffering punishment for attempting to play God. Such themes have become
commonplace in SF, but the example of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale shows that they
preoccupied authors long before the nineteenth century.
So far, we have been looking at how ‘science’ intersected with ‘fiction’ and
vice versa in the Middle Ages. But are there other ways of identifying medieval
science fiction? In his essay for this collection, R.M. Liuzza suggests that ‘if we
allow ourselves to look past the strict definitions and dismantle the [SF] genre a
bit to consider the various stylistic elements, affective moments, and tropes of plot
or character it contains, we cannot help but notice the many resonances, parallels,
and echoes between medieval and modern works’. For Liuzza, these ‘may help
illuminate not only some aspects of contemporary literature but also some of the
enduring power of these older stories’. Time travel is one theme commonly found
within the SF genre, and Liuzza uses this theme to offer a new interpretation of
the legend of the Seven Sleepers. His essay pays special attention to the Anglo-
Saxon retelling of this old story and argues that, even though attention to external
historical detail or precision in counting the passage of years differs from modern
SF novels, the ‘affective quality of temporal dislocation, the terror and marvel that
accompanies a recognition of time’s passing’ comes through very strongly in the
Old English. This is seen most clearly in the character of the newly-awakened
sleeper, Malchus, a man out of time, an alien ‘dislocated from the centre of his own
time to the margins of another’.
The ‘alien’ is another theme associated with SF. In modern fiction, and some
might say fact, aliens are extraterrestrials, occasionally visiting earth in their UFOs
and abducting humans in the night. But alien existence and alien encounters have
long intrigued (and frightened) human cultures, including those of the Middle Ages.
As such, this is another aspect of SF that can help illuminate the parallels between
medieval and modern literatures. In her essay, Mary Baine Campbell revisits those
otherworldly visitors, the ‘Green Children’ of Woolpit, who first appear in historical
works by Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh and, Campbell notes,
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 15
emerge from the ‘the entre-deux of science and fiction’. Some time between 1135
and 1189, a girl and a boy with green skin, speaking in an alien tongue, were found
in one of the pits that gives the village of Woolpit its name. The tale could be read
as something of a medieval X-File, but, contrasting the accounts of William and
Ralph, and exploring the legacy and afterlife of the tale, Campbell explores the
‘immortality’ of these beings and the questions they pose for genre history and
representations of race and identity – and indeed about the ‘little green men’ who
lie at the ‘iconographic heart of modern “science fiction”’.
So while the ‘science’ in medieval science fiction is important, these two
examples show that more thematic approaches to the topic can prove productive
too. After all, works of modern SF are not always heavily dependent on science
per se. Rather, a lot of SF uses the possibilities that scientific speculation opens up
to inspire a ‘sense of wonder’. Something of this can be seen during the explosion
of pulp SF in the early twentieth century, as magazines with titles like Amazing
Stories, Astounding and Thrilling Wonder led the way. C.S. Lewis, the renowned
medieval scholar and literary critic, as well as SF and fantasy author, lived through
the pulp era and was well aware (and rather fond) of these magazines and the kinds
of stories they produced. Lewis confessed to not being interested in the ‘technical’
side of SF – what he called the fiction of Engineers – but recognized that the genre
could draw on science and technology as a way of appealing to other, longstanding
human yearnings. It is worth quoting from Lewis’s essay ‘On Science Fiction’ at
length here:
When we learn from the sciences the probable nature of places or conditions which no
human being has experienced, there is, in normal men, an impulse to attempt to imagine
them. Is any man such a dull clod that he can look at the moon through a good telescope
without asking himself what it would be like to walk among those mountains under
that black, crowded sky? The scientists themselves, the moment they go beyond purely
mathematical statements, can hardly avoid describing the facts in terms of their probable
effect on the senses of a human observer. Prolong this, and give, along with that observer’s
sense experience, his probable emotions and thoughts, and you at once have a rudimentary
science fiction. And of course men have been doing this for centuries. What would Hades
be like if you could go there alive? Homer sends Odysseus there and gives his answer. Or
again, what would it be like at the Antipodes? (For this was a question of the same sort
so long as men believed that the torrid zone rendered them forever inaccessible.) Dante
takes you there: he describes with all the gusto of the later scientifictionist how surprising
it was to see the sun in such an unusual position. Better still, what would it be like if you
could get to the centre of the earth? Dante tells you at the end of the Inferno where he
and Virgil, after climbing down from the shoulders to the waist of Lucifer, finds that they
16 Carl Kears & James Paz Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 17

have to climb up from his waist to his feet, because of course they have passed the centre remarks, insightfully, that, ‘Just as in the case of modern films and stories about
of gravitation. It is a perfect science fiction effect. (Lewis 1982: 59-60) 10
extraterrestrials, tales about dog-heads posed the question of what it is to be human,
or a sentient being, and how far alien form entails alien being’ (Bartlett 2008: 95).
Dante’s Divine Comedy might be called a cosmic travelogue, taking us down to
Mandeville’s Travels is known for its empirical proofs (the earth is spherical and
the centre of the earth, up a mountain on an island in the southern hemisphere,
circumnavigable) and practical science (how to distinguish between three kinds
and finally into the stars. But we see a very similar impulse to the one described
of pepper) but also for its fabrications and exaggerations (e.g. gigantic snails with
by Lewis in more earthbound medieval travelogues, such as the Travels of Sir John
shells as big as houses). It is not alone among medieval texts in hovering uneasily
Mandeville.
between science and fiction, reality and mythmaking. How do we deal with such
The alternative realms that Mandeville describes cannot be dismissed as pure
texts? Can we read them, retrospectively, through the lens of SF? How should
fantasy, for they are depicted in his book as real places. Indeed, when Mandeville
we, as twenty-first-century readers, determine which aspects of a medieval text
speaks of the islands around India or of Cathay (northern China) he is speaking
were known to be ‘true’ and which aspects were known to be fictional? The Green
about places that were—still are—very real. When Mandeville reports automated
Children of Woolpit have sparked speculations about alien visitations in the Middle
golden birds that are ‘made to dance and flutter and beat their wings’ at the table
Ages. Sky ships recorded by Gervase of Tilbury and others have entered ufology.
of the Great Chan, we have good cause to believe him (Mandeville 2011: 132).
There is clearly a risk of gullibility when modern audiences engage with these
Yet do we believe him when he says that all the men and women on the island of
accounts. On the other hand, deliberately anachronistic readings—using terms
Nacumera have dog heads? Perhaps the Travels are not exactly ‘historical’ either.
like aliens, spaceships, robots—can encourage us to ask provocative, unexpected
It might be tempting for some modern readers to dismiss Mandeville’s book as
questions about medieval culture. References to automata in medieval account
both bad fiction and implausible history. Yet twentieth-century SF, especially the
books, romance narratives and manuscript illustrations have been seized upon as
planetary romance subgenre, appeals to a comparable impulse for wondrous things
evidence of manmade marvels or even medieval ‘robots’ by scholars such as Scott
in wondrous worlds that are definitely real but not, as yet, visited or experienced
Lightsey, Minsoo Kang and Elly R. Truitt, all of whom use the fascination that
by the reader. Such SF stories may be set on actual places like Mars or Venus (as
these living machines still hold for us as a starting point for investigating the cultural
C.S. Lewis’s own Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are, respectively) yet they
and political roles that they once played.12 Equally, when it comes to green children
also feature elaborate, incredible or simply made-up elements that feed our sense of
and sky ships, Andy Sawyer advises us not to assume that authors like Ralph of
wonder. The point is that, even though Mandeville writes about many ‘fantastical’
Coggeshall or Gervase of Tilbury were simply ‘credulous medievals’. Instead, the
monsters and marvels, he was not setting his narrative in Narnia; he was setting it
‘ring of truth’ their tales convey ‘may not be dissimilar to the plausibility offered by
on the equivalent of Malacandra (Mars).
hard science fiction’. In other words, these may be ‘mysteries with the illusion of
Many parallels between medieval travelogues and planetary romances could be
truth, which speculate about the nature of the reader’s world without necessarily
cited here, but it is worth staying with those dog-heads for a moment. Mandeville
becoming a definite explanation’ and are therefore closer to sophisticated science
goes beyond a straightforward reference to their unusual appearance; he considers
fiction than to naive pseudo-science.
their indigenous social and religious customs, too. They do worship an ox, and
Reading medieval literature as ‘science fiction’ can seem counterintuitive,
they do practice cannibalism; but the dog-heads are very devout according to
initially. When we visit the Middle Ages, it is unlikely that we will find SF as we
their law, and the king is a very good ruler so that ‘one can go safely throughout
(think we) know it. But an awareness of the interplay between ‘science’ and ‘fiction’
his whole country and carry all that one wishes’. Despite their hybrid human-
in medieval texts will not only enhance our understanding of how medieval authors
dog shape, Mandeville says that ‘they are people possessed of reason and good
drew on knowledge of the natural world to construct their literary creations—it
understanding’ (Mandeville 2011: 121). Mandeville is using the dog-heads to think
may also open up new definitions of the science fiction genre, allowing us to take
through the difference between humans and other living beings.11 Robert Bartlett
these two apparently contradictory terms (science/fiction) apart and to put them
10
‘On Science Fiction’ was originally given as a talk to the Cambridge University English Club in
1955; it was first published posthumously in 1966. 12
See Lightsey (2007), Kang (2011) and Truitt (2004 and 2010). Truitt’s book on medieval robots has
11
For an excellent, more detailed, discussion of Mandeville and the dog-heads, see Salih (2003: 125-27). just appeared (2015); her blog on the topic is available at http://www.medievalrobots.org.
18 Carl Kears & James Paz
back together again in surprising ways.
The Middle Ages in Science Fiction
So, convergence of the terms ‘medieval’ and ‘science fiction’ allows us to look
upon the Middle Ages as a period that disrupts conventional histories of the SF
genre. Turning our attention to contemporary literature, assessment of the kind
of ‘medieval’ past we encounter in modern SF takes us back to the problem of
periodization: are the representations of medieval people, places, and beings found
in SF influenced by those constructed histories that view the Middle Ages as a lost
opportunity for humankind?
While the ‘Fantasy and Science Fiction’ section of modern bookstores groups
two distinct (albeit related, ‘speculative’) genres together, it is fantasy that has come
to be casually associated with the medieval period. An aspiring reader of fantasy
would no doubt be directed to seminal works of the genre, which would most
certainly contain stories filled with medieval-like settings, heroes and monsters.
Accordingly, the fantasy genre has become one of the major focal points for the
thriving area of study now known as ‘medievalism’. But this affinity between
fantasy and the Middle Ages is built on a pervasive and widespread view of the
medieval period as a long age of faith and magic.13
The story goes that progress begins with the defeat of an inferior medieval
cosmology and with the triumph over religion, both set in motion by Nicolaus
Copernicus, whose work On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs (1543) employed
careful data analysis and observation to show that the sun, rather than the earth,
was at the centre of man’s cosmos.14 This ‘Copernican revolution’ was the moment
at which humanity moved away from ‘medieval’ superstition, stasis and belief in
magic (in other words, away from those things that modern fantasy might, at least
on the surface, take as its subject matter). Unsurprisingly, this is also a watershed
moment that, for many, makes science fiction possible. Adam Roberts writes that
the ‘Copernican revolution’ entailed ‘a cleavage between longstanding religious
ways of understanding existence—which is, in essence, a magical apprehension of
the cosmos—and the newer materialist, non-magical discourses of science’ before
asserting that ‘it makes sense to separate out “science fiction” from “fantasy” on
13
There is some evidence of this in the recent Cambridge Companion to Fantasy Literature, in which
the chronology of fantasy begins with Beowulf (James and Mendlesohn 2012: xv). The focus of the
book really begins with the late 17th century, however, where ‘we find the first critical awareness of the
separate existence of a genre of “fantasy”’ (3).
14
However, Copernicus may not have been the isolated Renaissance genius he is often taken for. For
an accessible explanation of the ways in which Copernicus’s work owes a debt to medieval antecedents,
see Hannam (2009), especially ch. 17.
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 19
the grounds that the latter is magical; it always includes an excess that cannot be
reconciled with or explained in terms of the world as we know it really to be’ (2009:
3-4). Issues of traditional periodization, then, are mapped onto issues of genre. But
such seemingly clear-cut distinctions between ‘science’ and ‘fantasy’, between ‘the
non-magical’ and ‘the magical’, are problematic. What about SF writers like Jack
Vance or Ursula Le Guin, in whose future worlds magic can be reconciled with?
And what of those who write magic as technology? Also, what kind of spanner, if
any, clanks into the works of historical periodization and into progressivist views
of genre history when we find a Middle Ages informed by historical and literary
scholarship in modern science fiction?
Though not the dominant aesthetic, the medieval period can often be located in
SF (as a time to be revisited, a space beyond the earth, or as an alternate or future
history), and it is not always simplistic, nor is it always rooted in the past. In-depth
knowledge of medieval literature and respect for the cosmological models of the
period have sparked prominent works of twentieth-century SF.15
The planetary romances of C.S. Lewis, for instance, were informed by the author’s
admiration of particular medieval texts as well as his expertise in the cosmology and
languages of the Middle Ages. ‘The Inklings’, of course, are important figures in the
history of medieval fantasy. The works of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, whose
Lord of the Rings firmly established the medieval period as a go-to model for fantasy
world building, were largely responsible for the ‘explosion’ and popularity of fantasy
in the second half of the twentieth century (see James 2012). But Tolkien, in his
unfinished Notion Club Papers and The Lost Road, and Lewis, in his Cosmic Trilogy,
wrote tales about time and space travel inspired by their professional, academic
interests in medieval literatures.
Lewis’s trilogy of science fiction novels (Out of the Silent Planet [1938];
Perelandra [1943]; That Hideous Strength [1945]) was in many ways a reaction
15
Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in their Inferno (1976), to take one example, utilise Dante’s
astronomical learning as well as the geography and cosmography associated with hell in the Divine
Comedy in order to create settings for their modern SF tale: Allen Carpentier, the narrator and protagonist
of the novel, is an SF writer, who dies at a science fiction convention and is then led through the circles
of hell. Niven, a writer of ‘hard SF’ by trade, has repeatedly returned to medieval themes and people
throughout his career. In the ‘Heorot series’ (Heorot being the name of the great hall attacked by the
Grendelkin in Beowulf), written with Steven Barnes and Jerry Pournelle, monsters based on those in the
Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf are found on another world. In The Legacy of Heorot (1987), the first in
the trilogy, a human colony on the planet of Avalon is attacked by ravenous ‘grendels’. The novel uses
these medieval stories and legends to enhance the atmospherics and geography of its science fictional
setting. Niven’s most well-known space hero, with roles to play in his famous ‘Known Space’ series
which began in 1964, is a one Beowulf Shaeffer. Elsewhere, in his short story ‘The Magic Goes Away’
first published in 1976, Niven explores the possibility that magic (or ‘mana’) is a non-renewable resource
that had come to earth long ago, borne on solar wind.
20 Carl Kears & James Paz
against the stratification of history and an examination of the dangers of modern
physics. These narratives were science fictional manifestations of Lewis’s distaste
for the widely held notion that the medieval period was inconsequential where
scientific progress was concerned. In The Discarded Image, Lewis’s introduction
to medieval cosmology, he praises the medieval view of the universe: then, space
was looked upon as a living, lighted, ordered concavity, not as a cold and vacuous
infinity (Lewis 1964). As the philologist Elwin Ransom, the hero of Lewis’s first
two SF novels (and a peripheral but important figure in the third), remarks when
observing the radiance of the galaxy in Out of the Silent Planet, ‘Space was the wrong
name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens—the
heavens which declared the glory’ (Lewis 1983: 35). At the close of Perelandra, in
which Ransom has travelled to an Edenic Venus (which, on first sight, is a golden
world that looks like a ‘medieval picture’ [Lewis 2005: 36]) and prevented the Fall
of Man recurring there, the ‘Great Dance’ of the harmonious cosmos is revealed to
him. It quells his fears about having to accept the dismal, dead image of outer space
fostered by modern science. These anxieties are expressed earlier in the novel:
Father, whither will you lead me? Surely not to the enemy’s talk which thrusts my
world into a remote corner and gives me a universe with no centre at all, but millions
of worlds that lead nowhere or (what is worse) to more and more worlds forever, and
comes over me with numbers and empty spaces and repetitions and asks me to bow
down before bigness. (Lewis 2005: 271)
Elwin Ransom is perhaps the first philologist to become an SF hero. His profession
might well be that of a man who digs up dead languages and looks to the past.
But Lewis transfers this philology, this science of words, to the realm of science
fiction, and philology informs some important (scientific) enquiries and events in
the Cosmic Trilogy. Michael Ward writes that ‘a recurrent feature of the Ransom
Trilogy is semantics: dead metaphors are brought back to life, decayed meanings are
reawoken in various words, Ransom’s own name is given an alternative etymology’
(2008: 48). This is science fiction in which the writer’s (and protagonist’s)
knowledge of and interest in old languages becomes concurrent with enquiry into
the nature of other planets: realizing that his name, ‘Ransom’, is more than ‘a play
upon words’, for example, the philologist on Venus perceives ‘what was, to human
philologists, a mere accidental resemblance of two sounds, was in truth no accident.
The whole distinction between things accidental and things designed, like the
distinction between fact and myth, was purely terrestrial’. This leads Ransom
to an enlightened view of his role in the great ordered meshwork of the cosmos:
‘before his ancestors had been called Ransoms, before ransom had been the name
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 21
for the payment that delivers, before the world was made, all these things had stood
together in eternity that the very significance of the pattern at this point lay in their
coming together in just this fashion’ (Lewis 2005: 182-83).
Why would professional medievalists be interested in science fiction? In his essay
about Scottish poet Edwin Morgan’s ‘Aliens and Anglo-Saxons’ in this collection,
Denis Ferhatović cites Kevin McCarra to suggest that working with medieval
texts requires careful application of ‘practical knowledge’ as well as a submission to
‘exuberant fantasy’. These two components, Ferhatović notes, ‘correspond to the
adjective and the noun in the very name of science fiction’. Working with poetry from
the Anglo-Saxon period (as Morgan did, translating Beowulf and other Old English
elegiac poems), like writing science fiction (something Morgan also did in his
collection of SF poetry, From Glasgow to Saturn), involves visualising supernatural
phenomena but also imagining events for those gaps or absences created by a
lack of historical information. Science fiction writing asks us to imagine future or
alternative worlds based on probabilities, on possible technological advancements.
Morgan suggested that his task when translating Beowulf was to reach across
expanses of time and space in order to realize a ‘secret and passionate sympathy
with the alien poet’ (Morgan 2002: v; emphasis added]. These stretches of time
between medieval culture and our own, between our present moment and a distant
future, involve giving imaginative life to that which cannot be fully known.
The Middle Ages also allow SF authors to reflect on potential encounters
between modern and premodern science. Connie Willis’s Doomsday Book (1992),
winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, presents a near future in which historical
research involves travelling back and forth in time. Patricia Clare Ingham, writing
about the novel in this volume, explores the way in which Willis’s fascination
with the timeliness of sounds, objects and things draws us into the blending seams
‘between future, present, and past’. The novel explores the risks and implications of
time travel to the Middle Ages, but allows us to acknowledge our own assumptions
and misjudgements about the medieval past. This is a fiction, Ingham writes, ‘more
profoundly invested in eventful repetitions, temporal crossings, and multiple timings
than it is in period difference’.
In addition to time travel to and from the Middle Ages, other SF writers have
transported medieval trappings onto distant planets and into far futures. Often,
this partners an exploration of the possibility that advanced technology can fall to
ruin. James Paz, writing on ‘The Medieval Dying Earth’ towards the end of this
collection, explores such futures in the genre of science fantasy that began to take
form with Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth and came to full fruition in Gene Wolfe’s
The Book of the New Sun. Reading ‘across a millenium’, Paz compares early medieval
22 Carl Kears & James Paz
imaginings of distant pasts and futures with the medieval futures of Vance and
Wolfe, bridging the gap between this book’s ‘Middle Ages in Science Fiction’ and
‘Making Medieval Science Fiction’ sections. These imagined futures, ‘coloured
in “medieval” hues’, challenge the chronological place of the Middle Ages in our
history. The Old Earth of the far future, beneath a feeble, dying sun, Paz notes,
questions ‘the extent to which remembering the medieval is merely a case of looking
back’. These post-historic settings challenge us as readers, scholars and writers to
‘remake the medieval past from its fragments and transport it into a future that lies
well beyond recorded history’.
Medieval things can be of other worlds, too. Verner Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep
(1992), which shared the Hugo Award with Willis’s Doomsday Book, presents a
‘medieval’ planet inhabited by dog-like, pack-minded ‘Tines’. With their castles
and crossbows, the Tines are repeatedly referred to as constituents of a ‘medieval
society’. These beasts also remind us of the animal races encountered in the distant
lands of the East in medieval travelogues, discussed above. The world of the
Tines is one without advanced aerodynamic technology, without gunpowder and
without knowledge of what lies beyond the stratosphere. Vinge’s novel examines
how exposure to advanced science affects these creatures following a course of
events that sees a spaceship fleeing a galactic catastrophe enter their atmosphere.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the Tines come to apply otherworldly, advanced knowledge
effectively. Their world comes to hold the only hope of defeating the ‘Blight’ (a
transcendent superintelligence accidentally awoken from an ancient database or
‘archive’ billions of years old).
Constructed ‘medieval’ societies and imagined medieval behavior, then, can also
be found off world in works of SF. The famous planetary romances of Edgar Rice
Burroughs, the subject of Andrew Scheil’s essay about courtly love on Mars in this
collection, provide another instance of this dis- or re-location. The Barsoom series,
and A Princess of Mars in particular, Scheil suggests, has a place in the history of
romance. Certain ideas and descriptions in ‘Princess depend more specifically on
medieval romance: or, to be more accurate, on late nineteenth-/early twentieth-
century popularized ideas of medieval romance, chivalry and courtly love’.
However, as Scheil states elsewhere in the essay, this is more than ‘borrowing’ or
‘redressing’ medieval romance in science fiction’s clothes: the ‘texture’ of planetary
romance changes subtly ‘in the adaptation of romance tropes under the presiding
interests and protocols of science fiction’. The use of the medieval by SF writers,
then, is often part of a complex movement between worlds, one that brings modern
expectations or assumptions about the Middle Ages to bear on narratives in which
old and new clash and future histories form.
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 23
There is a potential downside to these representations of the medieval period
by modern writers of SF, however, and once more it appears to come down to the
ongoing influence of progressivist histories of science that see the thousand years
between the Fall of Rome and the Discovery of the New World as a ‘Dark Age’.
SF writers can often be found adhering to what has become a trend in the SF
criticism they help shape: the dismissal of the ‘medieval’ as a time of barbarism and
backwardness. This is all the more alarming given the SF genre’s readership (it is the
most-read genre). We find questionable, frivolous and comedic representations of
the ‘medieval’ throughout SF history, too, from Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur’s Court (1889) through to masterpieces like L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest
Darkness Fall (1939), in which Martin Padway, transported to sixth century Rome,
develops such things as a printing press and prevents the ‘Darkness’ of the title (the
‘Dark Ages’) falling on old Europe. Even Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep refers to things
‘medieval’ (an unspecified term for both a lost age of castles and princesses on the
old world of Nyjora and the ‘Tinish’ world, stuck in its ‘Dark Age’) as ‘primitive’:
Johanna, a young human girl captured by the Tines, considers these dog-things ‘as
backward as people in the darkest ages on Nyjora. They had never had technology,
or they had thoroughly forgotten it’ (Vinge 1993: 118). Furthermore, we learn that
this is ‘a real medieval world. A tough and unforgiving place’ (234). As the ‘Tine’
known as Pilgrim states, ‘medieval types are used to courting treachery. So what
if the risk is of cosmic size? To us, here, it is no more deadly for that. We poor
primitives live with deadly risk all the time’ (569). Although this ‘medieval’ society
comes to understand the technology of a ‘higher’ race, the equation of ‘primitive’
and ‘medieval’ raises questions about what kind of Middle Ages such a widely
read genre promotes. This problem is not isolated to SF literature. Recall the half
a billion viewers who sat down and absorbed Carl Sagan’s ‘barbaric’ Middle Ages.
Jeff Massey, writing on Star Trek’s ‘inconsequential’ medievalism in this book, also
argues that the millions of devoted viewers watching the show, absorbing narratives
in which the Middle Ages are repeatedly absent and when present nothing more
than ‘immaterial fantasy’ (isolated to the holodeck, omitted from history), may play
a significant role in feeding a reductionist view of the medieval period to the masses.
On a more positive and creative note, science fiction may offer us a new way of
understanding the temporal and spatial location of the Middle Ages. As with Larry
Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who constructed a new reading of Dante’s Inferno from
a science fictional perspective, SF can send us back to medieval texts intent on an
examination of how they use or misuse the science of their day. Medieval Science
Fiction promotes a more informed approach to the medieval period for future writers
of SF. As Michael F. Flynn writes in the concluding essay of this collection, ‘if the
24 Carl Kears & James Paz
writer intends to place a story in the actual medieval world or seriously reference it,
he or she really ought to make some effort to get things right’. One thing could lead
to another. We might find ourselves asking if the medieval world has to exist within
defined and labelled parameters, or if the Middle Ages exist where one perceives
them to exist. And to another: in constructing alternative medieval histories, should
we also construct alternative, medieval futures? And to yet another: can we propose
a retro-causal way of doing Medieval Studies, in which our visions, our fantasies,
our imaginings of the future can alter the ways that we perceive the past?
Making Medieval Science Fiction
We have been arguing for a reading of the past in light of the future, for a new
creative and critical approach open to the fusion of science and fiction in medieval
texts and intent on reassessing the place of the medieval period in SF and in histories
of science. But can this also be a way of creating new fictions? The final essays in
this collection are concerned with ‘Making Medieval Science Fiction’. They ask us
to consider some new methods for SF writing. They show how Medieval Science
Fiction encourages the creation of a new aesthetic for science fiction.
So, what would a new work of medieval science fiction entail? First of all, this
would be science fictional writing with a strong interest in the particulars of medieval
science. The task would be building worlds based on genuine medieval sources
rather than received wisdom (or ‘What Everyone Knows’).16 World building can
be considered one of the SF writer’s most fundamental concerns: imagined settings
in SF, vast in scope and intricate in detail, are likely to become as significant as the
characters in contact with them. Successful world building involves being selective
about the elements of the research one chooses to reinvent (another point of contact
between the medievalist and the SF writer).
In order to extrapolate from this medieval science, creative writers must have
a firm and well-judged grasp of it. Indeed, making the case for his own brand of
medieval science fiction, ‘catapunk’, Minsoo Kang writes towards the end of this
book that ‘extrapolation of medieval ideas and devices should be informed by
actual medieval science and technology’ and ‘take place in a specific time of the
era’, avoiding the promotion of one huge simulacra of a long period in which there
were no advancements, no distinctions, from one decade to another. Knowledge of
medieval science allows for new thought-experiments, new ways of asking what
if…? Michael F. Flynn’s novel Eifelheim certainly follows the above criteria. The
16
For a recent creative writing guide to SF and fantasy world building that does not rely on general
cultural assumptions, see Vandermeer (2013: 211-45). The concept of ‘What Everyone Knows’ is
mentioned by the SF writer Catheryne M. Valente, interviewed in Vandermeer’s book (223-24).
Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 25
final essay in this collection provides insights into the research and methods that
brought us that groundbreaking novel. Flynn tells us how his own enquiries into
medieval science helped shape Eifelheim’s narrative, leading to some unexpected
conclusions about the relationship between medieval and modern science. ‘How
would medieval minds react to alien beings and otherworldly technology?’ the
novel asks. Surely, medieval people would be superstitious, seeing these devices as
the work of some demon? Flynn’s knowledge of medieval science (and of medieval
accounts of marvellous creatures) avoids propagating such assumptions (or, again,
‘What Everyone Knows’) in his exploration of a medieval village in 1348. Not
everyone there regards the alien Krenken and their high-tech machinery as sorcery.
What can be gained here? Why ‘medieval’ science fiction, specifically? First of
all, let us consider what Science Fiction Studies has to gain. Despite its status as
the genre that deals with important questions about humankind’s place beneath
and beyond the stars, addresses environmental perils and political power-shifts
and the shape of our possible future, SF and its legacies somehow continue to be
seen as trivial or ‘second-rate literature’ by the majority of literary scholars and
critics (see Westfahl 2002: 2). Medieval Science Fiction seeks to add to growing SF
scholarship by attempting to widen and deepen the genre, supporting the voices
that rally against SF’s marginalization within the academy. This is also a way of
testing the parameters of the genre and the scholarship that has refused to consider
the medieval period as part of its history, or its future. This could (and should) lead
to a rethink of what we mean by the term ‘science fiction’.
Looking from the other side, what does Medieval Studies have to gain? Can
we alter the ‘abject and regressive relationship to the present’ medieval culture
continues to have for non-specialists, during a time when things ‘become medieval’
only when it ‘becomes possible—and perhaps desirable—to leave them behind’
(Prendergast and Trigg 2007: 216)? Medieval Science Fiction suggests a reading
mode for medieval texts grounded in a more widespread understanding of medieval
science. Furthermore, reading as or with SF, this collection demonstrates, looks to
refresh the ways in which we can ask ‘what kind of medieval text is this?’ and
‘what kind of Middle Ages are we dealing with?’ The medieval period, then, could
(and should) be included in discussions about the future as well as the past. Like
science fiction, medieval texts and medieval studies (even ‘medievalism’ studies)
suffer marginalisation in the academy. A greater attentiveness and understanding
of the scientific achievements of the Middle Ages helps counteract this. To bring
medievalists, the SF community and more general readers into conversation and
collaboration – as Medieval Science Fiction (the collection and the ongoing project)
will continue to do – is to move away from a deep-rooted misperception that views
26 Carl Kears & James Paz Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 27

SF and the Middle Ages as potential threats to literary traditions, which may have 100,000 words on a matter that is not really worth serious attention.17 Although
something to do with their ‘foundational’ qualities (see Westfahl 2002: 2). Instead, medieval science fiction at times proves elusive, resistant, frustrating, we are
we can construct alternative histories and canons of literature, and new forms of confident that there is something there; there is something taking shape in the
medieval-based fiction which do not fall into a vague category of ‘medieval fantasy’ shadows between the future history and the alternative history... . But a history that
but insist on a more nuanced medieval science fiction interested in the ‘bits and we cannot know? This book suggests otherwise.
pieces’ of premodern knowledge.
To help unpack our perplexing title, we have structured this introduction around
a tidy chronological division: ‘Science and Fiction in the Middle Ages’ and the
‘Middle Ages in Science Fiction’. However, to our delight, the essays in this
collection move through and across the medieval/modern divide in idiosyncratic
ways. When proposing the project to our contributors, we asked them to:
Consider where, how and why ‘science’ and ‘fiction’ intersect in the medieval period;
explore the ways in which works of modern SF illuminate medieval counterparts; but
also identify both the presence and absence of the ‘medieval’ in science fiction history.

The result was a rich variety of takes on the nebulous concept of Medieval
Science Fiction. As such, the contents of this book are not organized according to
conventional chronologies or timelines; the arrangement is thematic, the essays
grouped under subtitles that reflect their preoccupations: medieval science and
fiction; time and space travel; the alien; technologies and manmade marvels; distant
planets, distant futures; and, finally, a section on making medieval science fiction.
But even if certain essays share certain themes, each contribution offers a distinct
version of Medieval Science Fiction. No dominant definition of this idea emerges,
but, rather, we witness a triangle of terms—medieval/science/fiction or fiction/
science/medieval—rotating and combining and recombining. We have essays
uncovering the science behind medieval fictions; essays debunking the fictions about
medieval science; essays exploring the medievalism of science fiction; and essays that
create new science fictions from the medieval. Taken together, the contributions
demonstrate that—far from being an impossible fantasy—medieval science fiction
may provide a starting point for some startling insights into both contemporary
and historical literary cultures. This collection showcases a panoply of contributors
—medievalists, early modernists, historians of science, research astronomers, SF
critics and SF authors—all providing their unique perspectives on the topic of this
book.
In spite of our best efforts in this introduction, some readers will no doubt remain
sceptical about ‘medieval science fiction’. We ask you to read on. To paraphrase
J.R.R. Tolkien, it is improbable that fourteen contributors would write more than 17
Tolkien famously said of the Beowulf poet that ‘It is, one would have said, improbable that such a
man would write more than three thousand lines (wrought to a high finish) on matter that is really not
worth serious attention’. See Tolkien (2002: 110).
28 Carl Kears & James Paz Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 29

Figure 1: The Chariots of the Sun and Moon, illustrating Cicero’s Aratus Figure 2: Lion-headed and man-eating giants, from the Wonders of the East
British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v [f. 47] British Library, Cotton Tiberius B. v [f. 81v]
30 Carl Kears & James Paz Medieval Science Fiction: An Impossible Fantasy? 31

Figure 3: Detail of a miniature, Figure 4: Detail of a miniature,

showing Alexander exploring the sea in his ‘submarine’ showing Alexander exploring the sky in his ‘flying machine’
British Library, Royal MS 15 E. vi [f. 20v] British Library, Royal MS 15 E. vi [f. 20v]
32 Carl Kears & James Paz
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